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THE problem of the expansion of a compressible fluid with friction and heat flow is one of great complexity. In this treatment it has been simplified to a one‐dimensional problem and the resulting relationships are thermodynamic. An expansion of this type cannot be described as reversible due to the presence of friction, and from this aspect the analysis may be suspect. However, any practical process is irreversible and it is common practice to apply to such processes an analysis which is theoretically confined to changes which occur reversibly. Thus, although the degree of irreversibility may be greater than usual in this case, there are many precedents for allowing the use of reversible thermodynamics in the analysis of irreversible changes. The relations for the expansion are well known, but the writer believes the analysis and discussion on the choking conditions of a nozzle are more general than anything yet published.

This study explored how the expression of search facets and relevance feedback (RF) by users was related to search success in interactive and automatic query expansion in the course of the search process. Search success was measured both in the number of relevant documents retrieved, whether identified by users or not. Research design consisted of 26 users searching for four TREC topics in Okapi IR system, half of the searchers using interactive and half automatic query expansion based on RF. The search logs were recorded, and the users filled in questionnaires for each topic concerning various features of searching. The results showed that the exhaustivity of the query was the most significant predictor of search success. Interactive expansion led to better search success than automatic expansion if all retrieved relevant items were counted, but there was no difference between the methods if only those items recognised relevant by users were observed. The analysis showed that the difference was facilitated by the liberal relevance criterion used in TREC not favouring highly relevant documents in evaluation.

The main purpose of this paper is to introduce a comprehensive model explaining the global expansion of firms and to find out viable strategies for firms to survive global competition.

Through the critical review over existing literature, this study first introduces a new framework explaining the global expansion of firms at the level of functional activities in the value chain, and then empirically tests the predictions of the new framework with data in the motor industry.

Empirical findings confirm the new model's predictions. First, each function in the value chain has a unique way of global expansion: the global strategy is suitable for the production function, while the multidomestic strategy is applicable to the marketing function. Second, each function follows a dynamic path of global expansion from domestic to transnational via either global or multidomestic, according to the innate characteristics of corresponding function. Finally, the degree of global expansion of a firm is positively correlated with its financial performance.

Focusing on developing a new framework on global expansion, this study utilizes a rather small number of data and, therefore, requires readers' discretion when interpreting the results of statistical analyses.

With the dynamic diversification‐coordination model, managers can recognize the level and characteristics of their firms' global expansion, not only at the firm level but also at the functional level. This allows managers to establish a global strategy tailored to each function, thus reconciling possible conflicts generated from different interests among different functions in the firm.

First, this article introduces a new perspective of analyzing the global expansion of firms by shifting the level of analysis from the firm level to the functional level where the new framework can reconcile the constant debates on globalization. Second, this article suggests an intuitive and theory‐based index measuring the degree of global expansion of firms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore query expansion via conceptual distance in thesaurus indexed collections

An extract of the National Museum of Science and Industry's collections database, indexed with the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), was the dataset for the research. The system architecture and algorithms for semantic closeness and the matching function are outlined. Standalone and web interfaces are described and formative qualitative user studies are discussed. One user session is discussed in detail, together with a scenario based on a related public inquiry. Findings are set in context of the literature on thesaurus‐based query expansion. This paper discusses the potential of query expansion techniques using the semantic relationships in a faceted thesaurus.

Thesaurus‐assisted retrieval systems have potential for multi‐concept descriptors, permitting very precise queries and indexing. However, indexer and searcher may differ in terminology judgments and there may not be any exactly matching results. The integration of semantic closeness in the matching function permits ranked results for multi‐concept queries in thesaurus‐indexed applications. An in‐memory representation of the thesaurus semantic network allows a combination of automatic and interactive control of expansion and control of expansion on individual query terms.

The application of semantic expansion to browsing may be useful in interface options where thesaurus structure is hidden.

This study explores how experts and novices in pedagogics expanded queries supported by the ERIC thesaurus, and how this was connected to the search effectiveness in an easy and a difficult search task. The expert group consisted of 15 undergraduates in pedagogy and the novice group of 15 students with no previous studies in this field. Their search logs were recorded and a pre‐ and post‐search interview was conducted. The results show that the number and type of terms selected from the thesaurus for expansion by experts improved search effectiveness, whereas there were no connections between the use of thesaurus and improvement of effectiveness among novices. The effectiveness of expansions varied between the facets of the queries. Thus, a vital condition for benefiting from a thesaurus in query expansion to improve search results is sufficient familiarity with the search topic. The results suggest also that it is not in the first place the number of terms used in expansion, but their type and quality that are crucial for search success.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the curvilinear effects of firm innovativeness (i.e. product, organisational and marketing innovation) on international expansion as well as the effect of expansion on performance in the developing countries (DCs) setting.

Research hypotheses are tested using survey data obtained from firms located in four South-East European DCs. Covariance-based structural equation modelling is used to test the proposed conceptual framework.

Empirical findings support the hypothesised U-shaped relationship between product innovation and organisational innovation and the level of international expansion of firms in developing markets. The authors found an inverse U-shaped relationship between marketing innovation and the level of international expansion. Furthermore, the existence of a strong positive link between the level of international expansion and firm performance is also confirmed.

While this research utilises a sample of firms from a homogenous group of DCs, further research could use a more heterogeneous sample and thus control the model for various contingency effects (e.g. environment turbulence, market structure and competitive dynamics).

When it comes to product and organisational innovation, international expansion is achieved only with a higher level of innovativeness. On the contrary, beyond a certain level, further investments in marketing innovation do not have additional positive effects on international expansion.

This study is one of the first that explicitly focuses on examining the non-linear effects of innovativeness on international expansion in the DC context.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between rapid internationalization and firm value in US restaurant companies. This study also identified the moderating role of available slack, potential slack and recoverable slack on the relationship of rapid internationalization and the firm’s value.

A hierarchical regression analysis with panel fixed effects was used in this study. Samples were drawn from publicly traded US restaurant companies, and span from 1993 to 2016 with 264 firm-year observations was used for the study’s analysis.

Drawing on Penrose’s seminal theory of firm-growth that a firm needs excess resources to grow and that the amount of slack resources directly influences a firm’s international growth, this study found that available slack alleviates the negative impact of rapid international expansion in achieving higher firm value.

This study is one of the few analyses that examined the speed of rapid international expansion in the service context. In addition, this study contributes to existing literature by examining three different slack resources with regards to the speed of international expansion. The findings of this study shed light on restaurant companies whose financial resources are critical for value-adding international expansion.

How to enter and expand in a newly emerged foreign market is less understood. Should multinational enterprises move fast or slowly? In this study, the authors take China as the context to investigate what factors will lead to a fast expansion strategy in a foreign market. The purpose of this paper is to understand whether fast expansion benefits firms’ performance in a rapidly emerging market.

Based on insights from field interviews, the authors developed a theoretical framework. Then, the authors collected data from surveys of managers of multinational enterprises from Western countries to test their hypothesis. This research context is based on the experience of multinational enterprises in China which opened up to foreign direct investment in 1979.

This study shows that internally, strategic long-term investment goals, top management team commitment and externally switching costs and the growth in the demand market which will push firms to expand fast in the newly emerged China market. Faster pace of expansion benefits the performance of multinational enterprises in a newly emerged market.

Based on the onsite interviews followed by the survey of top managers of multinational enterprises located in China, this study provides a fine-grained analysis of the importance of pace and its key antecedents. Thus, the results provide new insights to decision-makers of multinational enterprises when considering expanding in an emerging market at its early stages of growth.

This empirical study, from the international retailing perspective, examines the direction of retailers' further expansion after initial entry into overseas host market in the context of the luxury fashion retail market in China.

The research adopts qualitative multiple case studies.

After initial entry into China, luxury fashion retailers further expand their retail operations through three directional patterns: cautious, regional and countrywide expansions. The stepwise expansion from tier-1 to tier-2 and tier-3 cities remains popular; however, the importance of the tier system of Chinese cities has been weakened because tier-3 cities in affluent regions are perceived to have more potential than some tier-2 cities in less developed regions. The retailers assess a potential local market through interrelated criteria, including location and strategic importance, economic development, available store locations and staff, a high degree of urbanisation and tourism, debatable favourable policies and offers, and popularity of e- and m-commerce. There is a positive relationship between popularity of e- and m-commerce in a city and the potential of that city to run brick-and-mortar stores.

The paper offers an insight into the current international retailing literature by examining the direction of luxury fashion retailers' further expansion after their initial market entry. Particularly, the research considers a set of criteria which can be used to assess a potential local market, and the impact of e- and m-commerce on local market choices for brick-and-mortar stores.

The purpose of this paper is to utilize document expansion techniques for improving image representation and retrieval. This paper proposes a concise framework for tag-based image retrieval (TBIR).

The proposed approach includes three core components: a strategy of selecting expansion (similar) images from the whole corpus (e.g. cluster-based or nearest neighbor-based); a technique for assessing image similarity, which is adopted for selecting expansion images (text, image, or mixed); and a model for matching the expanded image representation with the search query (merging or separate).

The results show that applying the proposed method yields significant improvements in effectiveness, and the method obtains better performance on the top of the rank and makes a great improvement on some topics with zero score in baseline. Moreover, nearest neighbor-based expansion strategy outperforms the cluster-based expansion strategy, and using image features for selecting expansion images is better than using text features in most cases, and the separate method for calculating the augmented probability P(q|R_D) is able to erase the negative influences of error images in R_D.

Despite these methods only outperform on the top of the rank instead of the entire rank list, TBIR on mobile platforms still can benefit from this approach.

Unlike former studies addressing the sparsity, vocabulary mismatch, and tag relatedness in TBIR individually, the approach proposed by this paper addresses all these issues with a single document expansion framework. It is a comprehensive investigation of document expansion techniques in TBIR.